Czech humour in movies doesn’t always translate well – to the uninitiated, it tends to fall somewhere between two extremes: bitter and deadpan, or sweet and broad.

As a Brit, the former usually works better for me, as our own humour tends toward the sarcastically straight-faced and understated, whereas the broadest excesses of Czech comedy reminds me more of the bawdiness of our 70s sex farces.

Obecná škola (The Elementary School) is a sweet-natured coming-of-age tale set just after WWII, “after the Fascists have been defeated, and before the Communists have won.” It swings towards the latter, but is a genuinely funny movie. Oscar winning director Jan Svěrák (Kolja) demonstrates a deft touch for slapstick comedy and draws excellent comic performances from his small cast.

Obecná škola (The Elementary School)

It tells the tale of an inquisitive, imaginative young boy called Eda (Václav Jakoubek), who lives in Prague’s suburbs with his stuffy father (Zdeněk Svěrák, the director’s dad, who also wrote the screenplay) and frustrated mother (Libuše Šafránková, a Brno girl). Eda’s class is the naughtiest in Czechoslovakia, driving their timid teacher mad with bad behaviour.

The school’s headmaster (Rudolf Hrušínský) resorts to drastic measures, employing a former war hero, Igor Hnízdo (Jan Tříska) to bring the unruly mob back in line. Hnízdo is a colourful character: his involvement in the war might be somewhat exaggerated and his previous post as teacher in a girl’s school ended in scandal.

He is a ladies man, and the suggestion is that his interepration of “lady” extends to the younger end of the spectrum. He carries a gun in class and doles out corporal punishment to his students. Despite his harsh methods, he inspires loyalty and patriotism in the boys of Eda’s class, who stand behind him when scandal erupts, surrounding his involvement with two very young twins from the village.

The winning team of Svěrák Jr and Snr creates a richly nostalgic film packed with inventive sight gags, although suffers from its anecdotal nature. The nominally central character of Eda is a bystander as a series of comic set pieces unfold at a leisurely pace. Anything resembling narrative thrust is quickly discarded, and if it wasn’t for the film’s sumptuous production values, it would be very easy to mistake Obecná škola for a feature length sitcom episode.

Endless lavish crane shots swoop over and around the action, and Jiří Svoboda’s swooning, ultra-sincere score makes a good job of making the film seem far more weighty and prestigious than it actually is. Anything dark and distasteful, particularly about Hnízdo’s chequered past and possible pedophilia is scrupulously avoided, leaving a loosely connected shaggy dog story so sweet and sentimentally lensed that looks like it was dipped in honey.

It makes Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s big sloppy kiss of a movie which won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars a few years earlier, look like a hard edged slice of social realism.

Obecná škola shares many similarities with Tornatore’s love letter to cinema, not least its rose-tinted view of childhood set in the aftermath of the Second World War. It also recalls Dead Poets Society, released a few months before the Velvet Revolution, in its portrayal of an unconvential teacher inspiring a group of students.

Masaryk University invited me to introduce the film to a group of incoming foreign students, so I watched it twice within a week. The first time around I felt it was over-rated. I couldn’t understand why someone would make a film just after the fall of Communism about the short period of time before the Communists took hold, and determinedly say nothing about either.

That is one of the dangers of reviewing films made in your adopted homeland when you come from a country with a far less turbulent political history – you can fall into the trap of expecting every Czech film to tell you something meaningful and insightful about what life was like during that period.

I’m glad that I saw Obecná škola a second time with the students I was introducing it to, because I could see how the jokes landed and how enjoyable the film was to a foreign audience. And I laughed, far more than the first time round, and realised that it was OK for the film to be just warm and funny and not have anything deep to say about politics or history.

It is early days in my discovery of Czech cinema, but I think Obecná škola could be the perfect place for newcomers to start.

***

The DVD Obecná škola with English subtitles can be obtained online and at news stands.

1 Comment

Anna SedláčkováSeptember 29, 2014 at 10:49

Thanks for a great review, Lee. I just have two comments:

// Czech humour in movies tends to fall somewhere between two extremes: bitter and deadpan, or sweet and broad. (…) The broadest excesses of Czech comedy reminds me more of the bawdiness of our 70s sex farces.

I appreciate funny sarcasm very much and the Czech movies I watch definitely are that kind of funny.

// the suggestion is that his interepration of “lady” extends to the younger end of the spectrum (…) Hnízdo’s chequered past and possible pedophilia

No way “possible pedophilia”. I don’t think that’s in there, not even a little bit. He is a lady’s man but that’s it. The twins are like 17, you can legally have sex from 15 here. Hnízdo has an affair with the tram driver’s wife, sends a sex-proposal note to a fellow teacher from his last school and even tries to make a move on Eda’s mum – these are all grown-up women. He’s not a pedophile.

Oh, and I like that you call the Czech Republic your “adopted homeland” 🙂